RGB LED Lights

[GreyingJay]

Originally Posted by ABreyen

On the robot, can we use the 12V from the battery?

Yes, you could pull a run directly from a PDP breaker, or wire something off the VRM (and you can add a second VRM if needed for this purpose), or you could even use a solenoid relay from the PCM assuming you're using 12 volt pneumatics and not 24 volt.

Last year on our robot our green LED ring light for autonomous vision processing was powered from the PCM, since our VRM outputs were used by other devices (we had a webcam, and a Raspberry Pi running the webcam and vision processing software, and a D-Link gigabit network switch on board since the OpenMesh radio only has two available ports). This also lets you turn it on and off in software, whereas the VRM output is always on.

As a cheap and easy way to set up LED lights (non addressable, non controllable) we were looking at IKEA DIODER light strips. We would have run these off a PCM relay output or VRM output.

[BenBernard]

We run our RGB strips, ringlight, and targetting flashlight off of the roborio using PWM and a mosfet circuit based on a sample from adafruit. Very clean and simple.

Here's the adafruit link: https://learn.adafruit.com/rgb-led-strips/usage

Here's the rough circuit design. The green blocks are terminals.

[jlindquist74]

In 2015 we had common-anode LED strips on the forklift verticals, and drove them through MOSFETs connected to the RoboRIO PWM ports. (We switched to CAN bus Talon SRXes, so our PWMs were totally unused.)

We were reminded (the hard way) that the PWM ports are shut off as part of the safety interlock when the robot is disabled. The plan in 2016 was to use the Adafruit I2C PWM driver instead, assuming the I2C port isn't shut off when disabled.